Friday, February 10, 2012

Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 21.0

Mountain View, CA, February 10, 2012 - The Unicode®
Consortium announced today the release of a new version of
the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (Unicode CLDR
21.0), providing key building blocks for software to
support the world's languages.

Unicode CLDR 21.0 contains data
for 193 languages and 170 territories: 528 locales in all.
This release did not include a public data submission phase,
and focused on improvements to the LDML structure and tools,
and consistency of data.

Main features included the updates for
Unicode 6.1, a major cleanup of timezone names, date
format data, and delimiters (“…” vs „…“ vs „…” vs …); the
new BCP47 -t- extension; addition of ordinal
categories (1st, 2nd,…), collation reordering (eg, Cyrillic
before Latin), multiple numbering systems for a locale,
abbreviated numbers (eg, “1.2 B”); and restructuring of
Chinese calendar data. For more information on other changes
since the 2.0.1 release, see the CLDR
21 Release Note.

Unicode CLDR is by far the largest and most
extensive standard repository of locale data. This data is
used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software
internationalization and localization: adapting software to
the conventions of different languages for such common
software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones,
numbers, and currency values; sorting text; choosing
languages or countries by name; transliterating different
alphabets; and many others. Unicode CLDR 21 is part of
the Unicode locale data project, together with the
Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML:
http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/). LDML is an XML format
used for general interchange of locale data, such as in
Microsoft's .NET.